The new Red Sox City Connect uniforms are a lazy disappointment

After acing the exam in 2021, the Red Sox fail in 2025.

A plate of the roasted pork with rice and pigeon peas from The Roslindale Market & Deli, a Dominican-owned convenience store with small lunch counter on Washington Street, might be the best value meal in Boston. It costs about twelve bucks but seems to weigh nearly as much as a bag of baseballs. The pork is the star — tender and juicy with nicely crisped skin — but the rice and peas are nearly as good. I like them even better as leftovers the next day (and you will have leftovers) though it’s a good idea to place a wet paper towel on top of everything to keep the rice from drying out before you stick it in the microwave.

The Roslindale Market is only about four miles as the crow flies from Fenway, but you don’t need to go that far to catch some baseball. Right across the street is Healy Field, where you might see a game of the Stars Baseball League, a youth program that serves the Latin community of Rozzie, JP, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Hyde Park.

The fact that the market overlooks a baseball field is probably why local artist Greg Bernstein chose it as the site for his mural celebrating the Red Sox 2004 World Series championship. The mural depicts several Sox legends, but David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, and Manny Ramirez take center stage, more prominently situated than even Ted Williams. This makes sense, too. The Washington Street corridor stretching from Roslindale to Jackson Square is one of the primary loci of Boston’s Dominican community, dotted with Dominican-owned nail salons, restaurants, and barber shops, one of which is where Pedro used to go when he needed to freshen up his Jheri curl.

Dave Brigham

This is what Boston looks like — but you would only know that if you lived here. The rest of the world relies on Hollywood to get a sense of the city, and the ersatz Boston that exists on the screen doesn’t have places like the Roslindale Market & Deli. That version of the city isn’t Dominican; it’s Irish, insular, and hopelessly provincial. Everyone who lives there spends their Saturday nights at a dive bar playing Keno and has a father named Big Sully who lays brick. Most of the neighborhoods served by the Stars Baseball League don’t even exist in that version of Boston. This includes Rozzie, even though the mayor lives close enough to the Roslindale Market to pick up dinner there on her way back from City Hall.

Having lived just around the corner from the Roslindale Market myself, the tension between the Boston that actually exists and the Boston that exists in the imagination of the rest of the world has always bothered me. Boston is not the monochromatic village of scally-capped street-brawlers depicted by Hollywood. This city is a complex and dynamic place, a globally-connected minority-majority city led by an Asian-American woman who grew up 850 miles away. And that’s one of the reasons why I was so thrilled when Nike and the Red Sox used the Roslindale Market as one of the backdrops for the reveal of the team’s 2021 City Connect uniforms.

The Red Sox’ first City Connect uniforms were the first City Connect uniforms of any kind, and they shocked the sartorial baseball world when they were first introduced. Brash yellow jerseys at Fenway! The Red Sox, like most Boston institutions, hew close to tradition, projecting a staid sense of timelessness. These uniforms were a radical departure from that. They were loud, colorful, and joyous — all things that the Boston depicted by Hollywood is not (especially the colorful part).

This was all very intentional on the part of the Red Sox. The stated mission of the City Connect uniforms is to celebrate the bond between the city and the team. In 2021, the Red Sox not only came up with an inventive design inspired by the Boston Marathon, but they also used the occasion to deliberately address the team’s fraught racial history and reach out to the forgotten neighborhoods that aren’t traditionally associated with Boston. “People have an instinct about Boston that’s not exactly what that instinct is,” team representatives said at the time. “This was an opportunity to be like, let’s empower [new] voices and identify who can tell the story of Boston in a way that it hasn’t been told before.”

The official launch campaign for the jerseys featured a diverse cast of Boston-based creatives and highlighted locations throughout the city’s outer neighborhoods. This included not only the Roslindale Market but the Strand Theater in Dorchester, where both New Edition and Tracy Chapman performed to local crowds long before they gained international fame. The team was embracing a part of the city most people didn’t know about. Boston’s biggest institution was conspiculously reaching out to overlooked communities and saying you’re a part of Red Sox culture, too. In doing so, the 2021 uniforms didn’t just look great, but they also communicated something interesting and noble, something new.

And that’s exactly what is so disappointing about the 2025 uniforms.

The new uniforms, launched today prior to the battle of the aces against the Braves, look pretty good. Green is an underutilized color on baseball uniforms in general and, like a Marvel movie, the unis are filled with cute little Easter eggs that are instantly recognizable to Sox fans. (The notches on the numbers! The scoreboard font!) I am sure that the Sox and MLB will make a gazillion dollars off of them, which ultimately is what they care about.

But unlike the 2021 uniforms, these jerseys make no attempt whatsoever to say something about the city. Instead of using a Dominican convenience store next to a little league field, they used Fenway Park. Instead of using local creatives to launch the jerseys, they used Kermit the Frog. Instead of celebrating the forgotten outer neighborhoods of Boston, they celebrated the wall that literally divides the team from the rest of the city. They couldn’t even be bothered to leave the ballpark to film the launch video. The uniforms speak about the team while ignoring city the team calls home.

Moreover, the idea of using the Green Monster as design inspiration is just so lazy. We already know about the Green Monster. Everybody already knows about the Green Monster. A Green Monster-inspired uniform feels like the first idea to get thrown around in the boardroom before it’s dismissed as too basic and predictable.

The new City Connect uniforms look fine, but the entire concept underlying them belies their very purpose. It’s massively disappointing. There are so many things about Boston that deserve to be celebrated and given a wider audience and the Red Sox are better positioned than any other local institution to do just that. The team understood this last time around and attempted to show the world another side of Boston. This time they just went for the green.